Richard Roud, 59, First Director Of New York Film Festival, Dies

By GLENN COLLINS

Published: February 16, 1989

Richard Roud, a former director of the New York Film Festival who developed a risky experimental venture into an ornament of the city's cultural life, died of cardiac arrest on Monday in Nimes, France, where he had been in a coma in the Hopital Doumergue since suffering a heart attack on Jan. 15. He was 59 years old and lived in Paris.

Mr. Roud, who was influential in introducing dozens of foreign films to American movie audiences, had been vacationing in Nimes before going to the Berlin Film Festival. He had suffered from heart disease for some years and survived an episode of congestive heart failure three years ago.

At his death, Mr. Roud, whose title was director emeritus of the New York Film Festival, was finishing his critical biography of the director Francois Truffaut and was choosing films for a Film Society of Lincoln Center series in August, a series that will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the French cinematic New Wave.

''The Film Society intends to dedicate this program to his memory,'' said Roy L. Furman, the president of the Film Society. ''Richard Roud was for 25 years a guiding force of the New York Film Festival. His knowledge and devotion to film will be sorely missed.'' Dismissal Provoked Anger

In October 1987, Mr. Roud, a highly regarded film historian and cinephile, was removed from the festival directorship in a campaign spearheaded by Alfred Stern, then president of the Film Society, and Joanne Koch, the executive director.

The incident provoked anger among Mr. Roud's supporters and dismay among those who deplored the way his ouster was handled. Several film critics resigned from the festival's program committee in protest against the dismissal.

Mr. Roud was born in Boston on July 6, 1929. He received a degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1950, and after a year of study in France on a Fulbright Scholarship, spent two years doing graduate work at the University of Birmingham in England. He taught English at air bases in Britain for the University of Maryland's overseas extension program.

In the 1950's Mr. Roud became the London correspondent for the journal Cahiers du Cinema, He was a film critic for The Manchester Guardian from 1963 to 1969, and was a roving arts correspondent for that newspaper, now called The Guardian, from 1969 until his death. An Avocation Became a Vocation

During his time as a teacher in England, Mr. Roud began writing about film for British publications like Sight and Sound, and Films and Filming. After some work with the British Film Institute, which sponsors the London Film Festival, he became its program director in 1959.

The success of the London festival prompted Lincoln Center to develop a similar event in New York, and in 1963 Mr. Roud was invited to organize and direct the first New York Film Festival. His partner in this effort, Amos Vogel, resigned in 1969.

Mr. Roud was program director and chairman of the program committee of the festival from its inception, and in 1970 became the festival director.

''Richard was the right man in the right place in the right time,'' said the writer Susan Sontag, who first met Mr. Roud in Paris in the late 1950's. ''He got to know all the innovative New Wave directors and became a spokesperson for a whole new generation of young film makers like Godard and Truffaut and Resnais. He was an impresario for these continental filmmakers, and the films he promoted changed people's taste in this country.'' Influenced Scorsese

''Richard Roud shaped the very look of American movies, because so many film makers saw, and were influenced by, what he chose since 1963,'' said the director Martin Scorsese, who met Mr. Roud as a film student in the early 1960's. ''He built up a separate market for art movies around the country, and then distributors picked up the films he chose for the festival.''

Mr. Scorsese credited Mr. Roud with starting his career by accepting ''Mean Streets'' for the festival in 1973. ''He changed my life,'' the director said.

Mr. Roud lived and traveled in Europe for more than 25 years, keeping abreast of the latest films at festivals around the world. In 1979 he was made a Knight in the French Legion of Honor.

Mr. Roud also contributed to the programming of the annual New Directors/New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art, which is co-sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the film department of the Museum of Modern Art.

He worked with the museum on other occasions, organizing a film retrospective on the work of Jean-Luc Godard in 1968 and of Alain Resnais in 1969. Wrote Several Books

Among Mr. Roud's published books were ''A Passion for Films,'' a 1983 history of the Cinematheque Francaise and its founder, Henri Langlois; ''The Critical Directory of Cinema'' (1979); ''Straub,'' on the German director Jean-Marie Straub, and ''Godard'' (1968).

During Mr. Roud's tenure, the festival's prestige made it influential in determining film programming across the country, but it eventually drew criticism for not paying enough attention to American films, especially independent films, and films from Asia and South America.

''Mr. Roud has never been universally loved, which is to his credit,'' Vincent Canby, the chief film critic of The New York Times, wrote after Mr. Roud's ouster in 1987. ''He has always displayed a strong favoritism for the French cinema, but no festival director could be any good without biases that, if the system works, will be at least partially offset by the biases of the other members of the selection committee.''